One Health – a decade of progress

Animal diseases transferring to humans is the stuff of nightmares.

Greater cooperation between practitioners of human and animal medicine was first suggested in 1948 by the World Health Organisation. However it was not until the early years of the 21st century that the One Health concept emerged in response to increasing incidents of zoonotic disease outbreaks.

One Helath is a really interesting concept and one that makes a lot of sense on all levels. I have come across a few articles:

1. The evolution of One Health: a decade of progress and challenges for the future by E. Paul J. Gibbs BVSc, PhD, FRCVS
2. The One Health Initiative
3. One Health – One Medicine: linking human, animal and environmental health by Bruce Kaplan, Laura H. Kahn & Thomas P. Monath, eds published in Veterinaria Italiana

It’s an old joke in the veterinary community: What do you call a vet who treats only one species? A doctor! Traditionally, physicians have focussed solely on human patients. But Barbara Natterson-Horowitz likes to mix it up. She’s a cardiologist and psychiatrist. You might find her performing procedures at the UCLA Medical Centre in the morning and at the zoo in the afternoon. She’s just co-written a book called Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing.

Natterson-Horowitz became fascinated with the intersection of human medicine and veterinary medicine by chance. A cardiologist by training, she was offered the opportunity to give animals ultrasounds at the Los Angeles Zoo. One day, she was assigned to give a tamarin monkey an ultrasound and the vet in charge warned Natterson-Horowitz to tone down her eye contact with the animal because he was concerned that the patient might experience capture myopathy.

Natterson-Horowitz realized that capture myopathy was a lot like broken-heart syndrome found in human patients. When she went home to research the comparisons, she realizes that myopathy in humans had only been studied and discussed for about a decade. But in the world of animal medicine, it had been discussed for years and years. “I had this a-ha moment where [I thought] ‘My gosh, we need to learn so much from veterinarians,'”

This quote comes from a web page promoting the book called Zoobiquity. It is a précis of the first few pages of the book introducing a detailed and highly readable discussion of the whole “One Health” concept. I highly recommend it!